The U.S. National Park Service, now celebrating its centennial, has inspired and provided a home for many research projects conducted by UNC Asheville faculty and students. Researchers have studied the natural environment, how people and animals use it, and how to preserve it.

Learning in the Parks

Faculty in a range of disciplines will describe their work and its relationship to parks in a panel discussion, free and open to the public at 9-11 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 9 in UNC Asheville’s Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum.

Environmental Studies

Graveyard Fields along the Blue Ridge Parkway is prized as a berry-picking spot. But 50 miles away along the Parkway, the National Park Service has tried to prevent blackberry encroachment to protect the grassy bald habitat at Craggy Gardens. As part of a joint project with the National Park Service, UNC Asheville Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies Irene Rossell led her students in collecting data over 13 years on the blackberry management effort.

In a separate project, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Andrew J. Laughlin and student Savannah Clark spent many hours this summer at several sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway surveying bird communities in the high-elevation spruce and spruce-fir forests of the Plott Mountain range. These surveys are the start of a larger project studying how avian community composition differs based on forest size and disturbance (past logging and adelgid infestation) history.

Atmospheric Sciences

For Douglas K. Miller, professor of atmospheric sciences, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has provided the setting for hands-on projects in installing and taking measurements from a high-elevation rain-gauge network used in a NASA-funded study on rainfall patterns. Miller and his students are collaborating with Ana Barros and her students at Duke University as part of a large study of precipitation patterns and prediction.

Christopher Godfrey, associate professor of atmospheric sciences, and student Dawn Pomeroy conducted an aerial survey of damage done by tornadoes to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Chattahoochee National Forest. Pomeroy and another student, Michael Goldsbury, used the aerial photographs to electronically label nearly half a million trees, standing and fallen, with the direction of their fall. Godfrey, who also traveled to remote areas of these parks to assess damage on the ground, used his observations and the student-generated data to develop a new way of estimating the strength of tornadoes in forests.

Among others presenting will be:

Rebecca Reeve, director of research programs at UNC Asheville’s N.C. Center for Health & Wellness, describing her work over six years, undertaken with the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, National Park Service and other partners, to study and promote use of parks trails by children and their families, laying the groundwork for national expansion of the Kids in Parks program.

Leah Greden Mathews, Interdisciplinary Distinguished Professor of the Mountain South, describing her Blue Ridge Parkway Scenic Experience Project, to evaluate the economic value of the scenic quality of the southwest Virginia and northern North Carolina sections of the Parkway.

About UNC

The University of North Carolina is a multi-campus university dedicated to serving our state and its people through world-class teaching, research and scholarship, and outreach and service. The oldest public university in the nation, UNC traces its roots to the state’s 1776 constitution, which held that “All useful Learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more Universities.” Today, nearly 225,000 students are enrolled on 16 university campuses across the state and at the NC School of Science and Mathematics, the country’s first public, residential high school for gifted students.